Food for thought for Artists

Here you will find information for artists that will help develop a pricing strategy and other marketing information to help you with your professional art career.

Hobby VS Career

First we need to talk about the difference between a hobby and a professional career.  A lot of artists make their artwork regardless of medium; it can be paint on canvas, jewelry, photography or a pencil drawing.  If you’re doing it as a hobby and you just want to make enough money to cover your expenses, there is nothing wrong with that, but you will not be working with a gallery.

Galleries run as a business, and as a business they need to make a profit, and protect their reputation and integrity.  A gallery cannot have an artist that prices their work differently than what it sells for in the gallery.  If an artist is selling a piece of artwork at a gallery for $100 and then sells the same artwork for $50 outside the gallery; the artist is cheating not only himself, but the client and the gallery. 

The gallery on the other hand cannot in good faith sell to a client something for $100 when the gallery knows that the artist is selling it for $50.  It would not be very ethical in the part of the gallery to sell the artwork knowing that the artwork is only worth $50, because that’s what the artist is setting the value of the artwork at. 

You as an artist have to protect your reputation as an artist, and most of all protect your clients.  They have to be assured that your artwork will continue to increase in price over the years.

We recommend for starting artists to sell their artwork as cheap as possible.  There is a lot of competition out there and as I mentioned before, some people doing it as a hobby, not to make money, and those people are your competition as a starting artist.  

As a starting artist make your hourly rate let's say $10 an hour to start, sell 5 pieces and then increase your price by 10-15%; then sell another 5 pieces and increase it another 10-15%.  As an example if you sell 5 pieces for $100 just to cover your expenses of the drawing and framing.  The next 5 pieces will be sold for $110 and then sell another 5 pieces for $126.50.  Now you have a track record of sales and more important a following of clients who are buying your art and watching to see what you do next. 

Sales are the hardest thing to do in the art business as a starting artist, that’s why you should start out low and increase your prices as your technique improves.  After a while you can increase your prices to what they are actually worth. 

If you're selling a lot, then you can change your hourly fee to the highest you have sold for.  If you spent 5 hours on a project and managed to sell it for $500, then your rate will now be $100 an hour; so what sets your prices and hourly rate is what your last piece sold for.

Here is a sample of how you should price your art.

That is the proper way to price your artwork with up to a 50% commission included along with the profit margin.  That way when the clients buy from you directly, that is when you really make a profit.